On 2020-04-24 23:48:16 -0500, David Wright wrote: > On Fri 24 Apr 2020 at 21:07:31 (+0200), Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > > Since you don't want to purge pdftk, why did you decide to purge it > > above? > > Because in Real Life, pdftk is an empty transitional package. > In your hypothetical example you said it wasn't.
Oops, a typo: s/not/now/. So my example should be, after replacing "not" by "now" (and I hope "currently, this is like your example" makes more sense now): I think that you are over-optimistic. Imagine the following case. The pdftk package has been manually installed in the past and is now a transitional package to pdftk-java (currently, this is like your example). But the system has some package that depends on pdftk-java. So, when you run apt-get -s purge pdftk you won't have any message about pdftk-java. Later in the future, the dependency on pdftk-java disappears, so that pdftk-java will be proposed for autoremoval. But since this can occur a long time after the removal of pdftk, you probably have forgotten that you still need pdftk-java, even if you use it everyday. Well, for this one, one can probably guess (not sure though, as "-java" could also mean an extension for java), but there are packages for which one cannot remember/know all command they define. -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
